Killings

by Calvin Trillin

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  One of the people who happened to be sitting at the bar of Spanky’s, on River Street, when the FBI showed the bartender pictures of George Mercer IV and Michael Harper was Richard Sommers, an ebullient young man who constitutes the photography staff of a weekly Savannah newspaper called the Georgia Gazette. The Gazette was founded two and a half years ago by a young man named Albert Scardino and his wife, Marjorie, a lawyer who serves as publisher and occasional typesetter. Albert Scardino, who has a graduate degree in journalism from the University of California, had tried freelance writing for a while, had worked for the Associated Press in West Virginia, and had produced a film on the coastal islands of Georgia that was shown on the Public Broadcasting System. For a while, he had tried to raise money—from George Mercer III, among others—for a series of films on wilderness areas around the world. Aside from the journalistic experience he had picked up, Scardino had another qualification for being the founding editor of a weekly newspaper in Savannah—serious Savannah credentials. His father—a urologist named Peter Scardino, who came to Savannah soon after the Second World War—is not merely a prominent doctor but someone widely respected as a leading force in improving the medical standards of the community. Dr. Scardino is not interested in colonial genealogy—he is quick to say that the only revolution his ancestors might have fought in was the one led by Garibaldi—and he is not the sort of man who would spend much time at any club not organized around the subject of urology. Still, his badges of acceptance in Savannah include membership in the Oglethorpe Club. For years, he and his wife have served on some of the same committees the Mercers serve on and have attended some of the same parties the Mercers attended. One of Albert Scardino’s younger brothers grew up with George Mercer IV.

  Although a lot of the weekly newspapers that have sprung up in the past decade seem designed specifically for the editors’ contemporaries—or for some mythical twenty-nine-year-old purchaser of stereo equipment—the Georgia Gazette was founded to appeal to a general readership basically defined by its dissatisfaction with the commonly owned Savannah Morning News and Evening Press. In Savannah, the News-Press is widely described as innocuous or undistinguished; a contemporary of Albert Scardino is more likely to refer to it as “a Mickey Mouse operation.” Albert and Marjorie Scardino hoped that after a few years of weekly publication the Gazette might gradually increase its frequency until it became a daily alternative to the News-Press. From the start, the Gazette did not grow at the pace the Scardinos had envisioned. Capital was a problem. They did manage one business coup, though, which promised to buy them some time for building advertising and circulation: in January 1979 the Gazette replaced the Evening Press as what is known in Georgia as the sheriff’s gazette—the newspaper designated to carry the advertisements that lawyers in the county place to satisfy requirements of public notice. The sheriff, one of the three county officials empowered to decide which paper is designated, had persuaded a probate judge to go along with a switch to the Gazette—either because the sheriff was impressed by Albert Scardino’s arguments about the benefits of encouraging competition or because, as people around the courthouse say, he was irritated at the Evening Press. The designation meant thousands of dollars a year in automatic advertising, and the advertising meant a subscription from every lawyer in the county, and the readership of lawyers meant one more sales point to potential advertisers. The Georgia Gazette is not the sort of alternative weekly in which official advertisements seem incongruous. It carries conventional business and social news, as well as some pieces that might offend potential advertisers and investors. It has never been known for sensationalism or scatology. Albert Scardino comes to work in a coat and tie. The Gazette had obviously taken some care to recognize the value that Savannah places on being respectable—which is why people in Savannah were astounded when Albert Scardino, against the wishes of the Mercer family, published a front-page story on February 11 revealing that George Mercer IV was not merely missing but presumed kidnapped, and that Michael Harper was the chief suspect.

  Although the FBI agent at Spanky’s had not said why he wanted to know if anybody had seen George Mercer IV or Michael Harper, Richard Sommers could think of only two reasons for the FBI to be involved—a large drug bust or a kidnapping. Sommers had started questioning some of Mercer’s friends, and Scardino had bluffed a lot of the rest of the story out of a local police official. Although George Mercer III would not admit that his son had been kidnapped, it was clear that he did not want a story printed. “In the tried-and-true Savannah tradition, he called one of our stockholders,” Scardino said later. It was argued, by the stockholder and others, that a story might endanger George Mercer IV if he really had been kidnapped. Albert Scardino was not persuaded. Mercer had been missing for ten days. The FBI was openly looking for him. When Scardino pressed an agent at the Savannah FBI office to say whether a story might be harmful, the agent would only repeat FBI policy about not commenting on a case in progress. Scardino says he could not see the sort of clear and present danger that would have caused him to go along with, say, the embargo on stories about the American embassy employees hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran. He telephoned George Mercer III to inform him that the story would be printed and to suggest that the Mercers make some preparation for the press interest that would follow—preparations such as designating a spokesman. The man Albert Scardino was dealing with, after all, was practically a friend of the family. George Mercer III said, as Scardino recalls it, “You’d better quit worrying about a couple of little birds and streams and start worrying about the value of human life.”

  A lot of people in Savannah thought that Albert Scardino made a mistake in printing the story. They thought that whatever he had learned in journalism school about the people’s right to know simply did not apply. Some people thought that Scardino was just trying to make a splash. Some people thought the story might endanger young George Mercer’s life. Some people were pretty certain it would endanger Albert Scardino’s newspaper. They were amazed that Scardino, whose background had obviously enabled him to understand how the city worked, could have suddenly chosen a course that was so patently self-destructive. The Mercers and those close to them were furious. The Trust Company of Georgia, where people like the Mercers have always done their banking, canceled a large advertising campaign that was about to begin in the Gazette. Twenty people wrote angry letters to the editor canceling their subscriptions. Some people pointedly snubbed Albert Scardino on the street. One aunt of George Mercer IV ended an angry telephone conversation with Marjorie Scardino late one night by saying that she hoped the Scardino children would be kidnapped. Albert Scardino heard that a regular subject of conversation at one luncheon table at the Oglethorpe Club was how to put the Georgia Gazette out of business.

  Some people claimed that the Gazette story, aside from any danger it might pose for George Mercer IV, would warn Michael Harper to get out of town, and they may have been right: on the day the story was published, Harper left Savannah. He had the bad luck, though, to hitch a ride with a van that was stopped for speeding. Within a day, he was back in jail—held for a probation violation—and the FBI started amassing enough evidence to charge him with trying to extort forty-two thousand dollars from George Mercer III. Harper admitted nothing. He did say that if the police would let him out of jail he would help look for Mercer—probably in Greenville, South Carolina. Finally, toward the end of April, the police found Mercer themselves—buried in a shallow grave in the woods on the grounds of Armstrong State. He had been shot twice. Michael Harper was charged with murder.

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  The coroner said that George Mercer IV had probably been killed the first day he was missing. The implication that the Gazette story had appeared well after Mercer’s death did not do much to reduce animosity toward Albert Scardino. “The real improper thing,” Scardino has said, “was not that we endangered his life but that an upstanding, powerful, rich member of the community asked us
to do something and we ignored his request.” A lot of people in Savannah would probably agree that there was something in the Mercers’ anger beyond the genuine concern that any family would have for the safety of a son. Albert Scardino believes that people close to the Mercers were furious not simply because they had been defied but because they had been defied by someone whose family had been accepted into the group of people in Savannah accustomed to sorting out any difficulty with a telephone call. “That was the special betrayal that caused the special animosity,” he says. Richard Sommers, who did not grow up with the Mercers and the Scardinos, has a different way of explaining the special animosity. “They didn’t consider the crime a crime against society but a crime against them,” he said recently. “They wanted it handled their way. We treated it as a crime against society. We made them common.”

  In July, Albert Scardino learned that at the end of 1980 the legal advertising that had been given to the Gazette a year and a half before would revert to the Evening Press—cutting the Gazette’s annual income by some thirty percent. The official who pushed for the reversion was the same sheriff who had been the Gazette’s champion. For a year and a half, of course, the Evening Press had been trying to win back the advertising, using every form of pressure at its disposal; the officials in charge of the designation were even lobbied by News-Press reporters assigned to cover their activities. Last spring, though, the officials began to receive telephone calls from what one of them has called “surprisingly high places.” George Mercer III says he had no part in a campaign to deprive the Gazette of legal advertising, but he also acknowledges that he had heard about the telephone calls—made, perhaps, by people he describes as “misguidedly thinking they were representing me.” There are, as Mercer suggests, a number of other ways that the reversion can be explained. For a while, Scardino himself had an ornate theory involving the Georgia senatorial election. It may even be, of course, that the sheriff simply changed his mind for sound reasons of public policy—although that interpretation is not bolstered by his refusal to discuss the matter. Albert Scardino now believes that the change was brought about by a combination of factors, but he has become convinced that one of them was a decision made over lunch at the Oglethorpe Club.

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  This winter, Michael Harper finally went on trial. Just before the trial started, he pleaded guilty to extortion, but he still contended that George Mercer IV had been alive the last time he saw him. According to his defense on the murder charge—revealed by the Georgia Gazette just before the trial got under way—everything had flowed from an attempt that he and George Mercer IV made to raise capital for a business they wanted to launch: a custom-stereo-speaker concern called Quest Labs. Harper said that he and Mercer and two other people, whom he refused to name, had tried to raise the capital by buying more than forty thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana for resale. They had bought the marijuana on credit, Harper said, but it had been stolen before they could resell it. Under threat of death from the people who wanted their forty-two thousand, the four partners had decided to extort the money from George Mercer’s father—with young George himself as a full participant. When the extortion scheme fell apart, Harper said, the four had fled in different directions. Harper calmly, sometimes brilliantly, defended his story on the witness stand. The jury took four hours to convict him of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maintaining his innocence to the end, Harper said he could only offer condolences to the Mercer family on George’s death. “He was a friend of mine,” Harper said.

  Not many people in Savannah believed Harper’s story. It sounded like a knockoff of the defense in the Bronfman kidnapping. Still, there are a lot of people who don’t believe that, as the prosecution maintained, Michael Harper simply kidnapped George Mercer IV and shot him in cold blood to avoid having a prisoner to guard while negotiating the ransom. The Gazette coverage has constantly pointed out loose ends in that version of what happened. There are other stories floating around Savannah to explain what might have happened between George Mercer IV, the gullible son of a rich family, and the brilliant but twisted Michael Harper. A lot of them, like a lot of stories that try to explain mysteries these days, have to do with drugs. What makes some people in Savannah feel vulnerable is that George Mercer IV and Michael Harper knew each other at all. George Mercer III still finds it astonishing that the young people Michael Harper came in contact with didn’t know or didn’t care about his criminal record. Thinking about it recently, a resident of Savannah in his sixties said, “What this business with drugs and the new lifestyle and all that has changed is this: we didn’t use to have to worry about our kids’ mingling with someone like that.”

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  After a short period of coolness, people close to the Mercers began to treat Dr. Peter Scardino and his wife the way they had treated them before George Mercer IV disappeared. George Mercer III is quick to express his respect for Dr. Scardino. The Scardinos were quick to express their sympathy to the Mercers. Whatever might have been done by relatives of the Mercers, Dr. Scardino has never thought of the Mercers themselves as the sort of people who could tell a mother that they hoped her children would be kidnapped. A few days after the trial, George Mercer III said, “I’m too drained spiritually and mentally and physically to have any animosity toward anybody,” but he couldn’t speak of Albert Scardino without the animosity’s coming to the surface. The family’s bitterness toward Scardino had been increased, in fact, by the Gazette’s coverage of the trial, which Mercer considered a matter of “gross callousness and insensitivity.” Despite prosecution testimony to the contrary, the Gazette wrote, investigators had been told that George Mercer IV did some minor dealing in marijuana and perhaps cocaine. Even the News-Press, whose coverage of the case had been dominated by politesse (a February feature about George Mercer IV and his friends had been headlined MERCER CALLED “TYPICAL” YOUNG MAN), had been forced to bring up the subject of drugs in covering Michael Harper’s defense. A day after the sentencing, the Mercers, who had been dealing with the press through a family spokesman, asked a local television reporter they knew to come to their house with a film crew. Mrs. Mercer read a statement saying that their son had not been involved in drugs and could not have been involved in any schemes with Michael Harper. After she had read the statement, Mrs. Mercer added, “I would like to say that George was not a friend of this man.”

  The Mystery of Walter Bopp

  * * *

  Tucson, Arizona

  MAY 1981

  What happened to Walter Bopp is a mystery. In fact, the more that is known about what happened to him, the more mysterious it becomes. The first incident did not seem mysterious at all. In the fall of 1979, Walter Bopp, a vigorous man in his late seventies, was attacked and presumably robbed in downtown Tucson—right in front of the business he and his wife had founded in 1934 as the first health-food store in the city. The incident did not make the newspapers. Tucson is one of those middle-size Sunbelt cities which are becoming accustomed to the routine muggings and burglaries that a few years ago were associated with the huge old industrial cities of the Northeast. It is no longer unusual for residents of Tucson to own a sophisticated burglar-alarm system or a gun or even, as Walter Bopp did, an attack dog. The second incident—a house fire last spring which the fire department blamed on an electrical short circuit—would probably have gone unreported as well except that when firemen reached the cellar they found, to their understandable dismay, a supply of dynamite and blasting caps that, according to a department spokesman, could have caused a large enough explosion to obliterate Bopp’s house, all the firemen in it, and a couple of neighboring houses. The mystery of why someone would store dynamite in his basement seemed to be cleared up when Bopp explained that it was from a nonproducing mine he had operated near Arivaca—a tiny gold- and silver-mining town about an hour in the direction of the Mexican border. Last December, though, Bopp was involved in an incident that was not simply mysterious in itself but su
ffused the previous incidents with mystery. On a Saturday morning, someone phoned Bopp’s second store, on East Speedway Boulevard, and informed a clerk that the proprietor had met with an accident and could be found in the back storeroom. Walter Bopp had been bound with tape and badly beaten the night before. He had serious facial bruises, several broken ribs, and a broken pelvis. His attack dog had been killed by having its belly slit open. His pickup truck had been driven to the downtown store and then set on fire. Both stores had been gone through, but no money was missing.

  Bopp claimed that all the incidents were related—that the fire had been caused by arson rather than a short circuit, that the mugging a year earlier had been not a simple mugging but an act of terrorism. He even implied that he knew who was to blame—but that was as far as he would go in helping police identify his tormentors. He wouldn’t say who and he wouldn’t say why. “It’s the same people,” he was quoted as telling his interrogators. “I don’t want to say anything more.” Two weeks later, just after Bopp was released from the hospital, it was reported that someone had backed a truck up to his Speedway store and was presumably loading something into it while colleagues stood by with what looked like machine guns or automatic rifles. The police arrived too late, and if Walter Bopp knew who might be removing what from his store he wasn’t saying. He still hadn’t said in January, when he reentered the hospital and, a day or two later, died of a pulmonary embolism. All of which set a lot of people in Tucson thinking about what in the world might have happened to Walter Bopp.

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  “I didn’t think he had an enemy in the world,” one of Walter Bopp’s employees had told the Arizona Daily Star after the December beating. That is, of course, a remark often made when a respectable citizen meets with what is obviously not random violence. To the casual customer of Bopp Health Food, Walter Bopp probably did appear to be a particularly unlikely candidate for vicious assault—a robust, rosy-cheeked old vegetarian whose knowledge of herbal remedies led some of his customers to refer to him as Dr. Bopp. A Swiss immigrant who retained a slight accent, Bopp was known as a man who worked hard and lived frugally. A lot of people in Tucson had seen him on the back of his pickup truck loading or unloading stock; nobody in Tucson had ever seen him in a necktie. Who would want to terrorize a simple purveyor of wheat germ and herbal tea?